


Love Bomber

by Potboy



Series: From the Ashes [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M, Mostly Gen, POV Armitage Hux, Self-Discovery, Self-Doubt, in a pre-slash sort of way, more First Order culture, sort of gingerpilot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24647164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: I saw a prompt which wanted to see the Resistance's reaction to the fact that Hux was good with children. This is my (possibly unwanted) take on that scenario.In which Poe is charmed by how nice Hux is to kids, and Hux has something to say about that.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Series: From the Ashes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782016
Comments: 22
Kudos: 89





	Love Bomber

“No! No! Leave me alone. I hate you!” The child lunged forward and buried its teeth in Poe's outstretched hand. The little incisors were sharp as vibroblades, and the child's frothing snarl pulled a flash of panic from his mind. Were they mad? Diseased?

“Listen, buddy,” he forced his voice calm, ashamed of that spike of fear. But he pulled back his stinging hand and held it protectively against his chest regardless. “We've gotta go, right? Look around you, this place isn't—”

“Leave me ALONE.”

“Poe, the ship's running out of air.” Finn's hand pressed something hard into the small of his back. A blaster, by the feel of it. Finn leaned closer to whisper, “I've been through this exact thing five times in simulations, and the best way is to stun them. Get them out of here fast and negotiate later, on the Falcon, where it's safe.”

“We don't go around taking life lessons from the First Order,” Poe retorted, watching the scrap of foetid humanity wriggle further into the collapsed vent, now beyond his arm's reach. “The kid'd never trust us again.”

The kid smelled of shit and blood. As did the whole, junked survey ship. Pirates had taken everything – fuel, food, water, cargo, most of the crew. The bodies on the floor might have been the kid's parents. When the Falcon had intercepted it on the way back from Exegol, the distress call had been pinging for over three standard days, and the child must have been alone here, surrounded by the dead, for all that time.

He got why the kid was upset, he really did. The days of being unmade after his mom died pushed up under the panic like the blood in a blister, but that had been something different. Didn't qualify him to speak to this. Right here, right now, short of hauling the kid out of there bodily, what could he do? What could he say?

“Go back to the ship and let me speak with them.” A lean leg in a perfectly fitted boot glided into view. He looked up, and there was Hux, looking unfairly put together, his oval face smooth and his unsettling bright eyes trained with a kind of professional curiosity on the child.

Their first stop on this rescue tour had been to extract Hux from his own dead ship, where Poe had found him close to death, ash-smudged and mourning; open like a dropped egg. He had been doing a good job of holding all the pieces together since then, but it was an act. Poe was sure that all of it must be a kriffing act.

“Right, yeah,” Poe quipped—could he hear the hiss of escaping air or was that just his imagination— “Leave the local psychopath alone with the kid. Why didn't I think of that?”

“Actually,” Finn holstered his blaster and tugged at Poe's arm. “It's not a bad idea.”

When Poe gaped at him, Finn ducked his head and grimaced. “Stormtroopers don't spring into life fully grown, you know. There are a whole load of kids on those Star Destroyers.”

“And?”

Finn winced a smile. “And they like him. Let him try.”

“Okay,” Poe conceded, as Finn and Rose made for the Falcon. He folded his arms across his chest and settled in the arch of the door. “But I'm going to be right here, keeping an eye on him.”

“Aren't you always,” Rose shouted over her shoulder, laughing dismissively at his shocked expression.

Poe huffed to himself in reply. The room was growing stuffy already, and his face felt hot and raw. What did she mean, that he was always keeping an eye on Hux? Someone had to, and the view was fine.

The man in question had now hunkered down in front of the vent where the child was hiding. He was smiling a small, almost tender smile that smoothed out all the jutting edges of bone in his face and left it looking young and kind. He brought a ration bar out of one of his pockets and laid it on the floor in front of him. Then, to Poe's dismay, he plucked a small knife from the lining of his boot and set it down beside the food.

There was a stir in the recesses of the vent. Poe had no force sensitivity but he swore he could feel the atmosphere of the room change. Or perhaps it was just the way the child's fist flexed on its knee with hunger, or curiosity.

“The world is scary, isn't it?” Hux said to it, quietly, almost as though he was speaking to himself. His smile flexed for a moment into something self-depreciating, rueful, and Poe was reminded again of how he had found the man—half dead, in the utter ruination of his life's work.

“This is where I would have told you about the First Order,” Hux was saying now. Still gentle, encouraging, not making any sign to show that he had noticed the child leaning forward, eyeing knife and food with transfixed eyes. “I would have told you that if you came with us to the big ships, we could make it so you would never have to be afraid again, because we would make it so the world would be afraid of you. I would have told you that you'd never be alone again, because there were hundreds of other children aboard, just waiting to be your family.”

He gave a small laugh, as though he was sharing a secret with the child. They edged forward a little, perhaps lulled by the wistfulness, the lack of urgency in Hux's tone.

“But I can't tell you that any more. Everything I cared about is gone too.”

That sparked a reaction, the kid's head coming up and their eyes widening. Poe thought it was probably a girl, but he was going to wait to ask. He found himself holding his breath as she lunged forward to snatch up the ration bar, tear it open and chew it.

“We do have more food on board, though,” Hux said, his voice warm, his whole body expressing a trustworthiness that made Poe think of him for a moment as _sweet._ A sweet young man.

This fleeting sweetness was something Poe had glimpsed before. It had worked its way into his idle daydreams. He'd found himself wondering if it was a glimpse of the man Hux could have been, if he hadn't been raised by war criminals and shaped into a monster they could call their own. Maybe it was the seed of something good in him, that could flower, if Poe could only nurture it with enough care.

The temperature controls in here were truly on the fritz. Either that or he was coming down with some kind of fever, because if he was in his right mind he could not be looking at the man who destroyed five worlds and seeing something attractive.

“And if you come with us, I promise I'll teach you to use the knife, so that if troubles do come our way, we can cut them into little pieces, together... Is it a deal?”

Poe stifled his laugh just in time to avoid startling the child as they came crawling out of the dark, their hand closing white-tight around the hilt of the dagger. “Deal.”

~

Later, while Chewie was teaching the child—now cleaned and revealed to be a girl called Cehar—how to make a pillow fort in the crew quarters, Poe tracked Hux down in the smuggling hold. Hux had requisitioned a thin sleeping pad and a single blanket, diverted enough of the wiring to give the compartment a cheerless blue bulb of illumination, and was propped against the wall with his long legs outstretched, and that startling warmth discarded like an overcoat. His posture was stiff again, and his eyes once more cold-bright with calculation.

“Hey,” Poe whispered—the dark of the cubby hole demanding it, and his own heart hoping, wishing, he wasn't sure what for. For the sweetness to be the truth? For this ever-guarded, paranoid person to speak to him with the intimacy with which he had spoken to Cehar? “You're a man of many talents.”

“Indeed,” said Hux, the ends of his mouth compressing in a way that hardened the shape of his whole face. Hostile? Or just wary?

“I mean I didn't see you as a guy who would be good with children. But it's a nice look on you. Compassionate, you know? Makes me think there's something redeemable in you, after all. You should get into teaching, maybe? No one would ever look at you and think 'General Hux' if you were a kindergarten teacher.”

Hux's mobile mouth drew down, and the flame of his eyes seemed to burn even colder. “No? Yet everything I used today, I learned from my father. He peddled love as though it were spice—give them just a taste and then keep them crawling back on their bellies, addicted and miserable and desperate for more. He could be as depraved as he wished, as cruel as he pleased; we wouldn't care. We'd have carved out our own eyes and handed them to him if he'd asked for them. If we thought it would please.”

Poe recoiled, wrong-footed and abruptly angry with himself for having been taken in, betrayed both by Hux and by his own heart. Because Hux was talking about brainwashing, right? Or abuse? The kind that started with love-bombing and ended with a boot on your throat. 

That was what brainwashing looked like? It looked like kindness? Like understanding and concern? Bile rose in his throat as he tried to identify the falsity of his memory of Hux crouched down and coaxing the child to his hand as though she was a stray loth-cat. The premeditated intent should have stood out, surely? Poe should have been able to see it. The sugar should taste of poison even in the first spoon. 

“We used similar techniques, chemically reinforced, to keep the troopers loyal.”

The only thing that stopped Poe from fleeing was seeing his own revulsion mirrored on Hux's face. Hux wouldn't confess like this, surely, if he didn't know on some level that it was wrong. And oh Stars! Poor Finn, no wonder he had been so… weird… about suggesting Hux should lure Cehar out. Was that something Finn had had to break free of too? Love, used as a chain? Love, corrupted down to its deepest roots?

“I won't do that to her, or to _anyone_ ever again,” Hux finished, both defiant and oddly pleading, as though Poe had demanded it of him. “When I worked out that father had done it to me, I killed him. It was filthy. Dishonest. A lie, like everything else. You promised me that life was done. I _refuse_ to bring it into—”

"No, no, no," Poe raised his hands, tripped up again by the failure of his assumptions. “I'm not asking you to. I thought it was real. I thought maybe you were really a kind, sweet person underneath.” A bark of rueful laughter escaped. “I guess I should have known.”

“It was my job,” Hux said bitterly. His folded arms and defensive chill made more sense now, but now it was his distress that gave Poe hope for his soul. “My father taught me exactly how much vulnerability to show to win trust. How to establish empathy. How to build up confidence in the handler and break it down in the subject. How to inspire sacrifice to the point of self-annihilation.”

Poe edged closer, not sure what he was compelled by. Upstairs in the galley there would be easy conversation and laughter. He didn't know why he wanted to be here with this eloquent monster instead.

“Are you using it on me?” he asked, half joke and half disquiet. He had thought he would know the fake from the real, after all, but he hadn't.

Hux smiled. “I would hardly tell you if I was. But no, my father was… He was a more sociable man than I. He enjoyed people—enjoyed playing with their affections and their insecurities. It was like air to him, being the capricious god at the centre of their universe, knowing that he could dispense joy or misery as pleased him. I could apply the techniques, of course, but I found it distasteful. Tedious. It always made me wonder...”

He trailed off. His hands now lay open by his sides and his shoulders had dropped. In the quiet twilight of this inner room, Poe felt he was being given a glimpse of a secret truth, something confessional, private, that Hux had never shared before. Or… at least he thought he was. 

“What?”

“It always made me wonder if love could be a real thing. Why would humans have these tendencies to exploit at all,if the original of love did not exist? But perhaps we evolved to imprint on one another like newly hatched porgs precisely for this—so that the strong among us could use it as yet one more tool with which to control the weak.”

Poe shook his head. Force! The gulf between the Resistance and the First Order opened wider and wider the more he peered at it. “Of course love's real,” he scoffed. “It's the most powerful thing in the universe. It's why we won—because we had the real thing and you only had the fake. People might get taken in by the fake for a little while, but in time they figure it out, like you did with your dad. The real thing doesn't tarnish. Doesn't fade. Doesn't hurt. The real thing feels like freedom, you know?”

A moment of silence passed. Poe settled gently into a strange, poignant pity. What a sarlaac pit the First Order must have been to weaponize even love and how… touched... Yeah, how touching it was, to be trusted to answer something so big.

“I _don't_ know,” Hux concluded, pale eyes like slivers of glass beneath his watered-gold lashes. “And I'm not sure I'm willing to put myself in a situation to find out.”

Poe laughed, turning from disgust to a mysterious elation, quick as a barrel-roll in an x-wing. “Oh buddy, don't rule it out. Love's not tame, whatever your dad might have thought. It'll come even for you in the end.”


End file.
